The below blog entries all focus on the three centres of intelligence: the gut, heart and/or head. Since some of them also include other tags, the same articles might show up in other collections, too.
The oak and the rose bush — the four different ways comparisons sabotage our splendour
One of our flagship qualities as human beings is our advanced neocortex; our ability to think in abstractions and hypotheses, to assume, then gauge our own assumptions — and, not least to compare. And sure, they are indeed advanced features. And they are helpful, too. At least some of the time. The problem with all these advanced functioning is that the ego tends to employ them…
”As I say yes to myself right now …” — restoring order to the universe
“The cosmos is always in motion but it is never in chaos. Only humans create chaos.” This sentence was staring me in the face one day when I opened the file to continue the translation of the book The Ultimate Guide to Yinyang. And what made it stick out for me was a cat-related incident right before it. Me and my husband share our living space…
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The perceived but non-existent sameness AND inequality of the centres — how we got it backwards
When it comes to the centres and type, there are some paradoxical misconceptions floating about in the Enneagram world. Ironically, out of the two major ones, one is about a perceived but non-existent inequality, and the other, paradoxically, about a perceived but non-existent sameness. The imaginary inequality in centre access The first misunderstanding is that, courtesy of which Enneagram type we belong to, we operate only…
Where It Takes Only One to Tango — and Falling from the Dance into the Heart
We, or our ego mind, likes to see things dualistically. As opposites — or, by all means, as complimentary powers; the ego isn’t necessarily opposed to those, either. But it always seems to be about two ends of a stick, with us somewhere in between — usually closer to either, sticking to one or bouncing back and forth between extremes. In the Enneagram world, we are…
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Deeper Inner Work: Balancing the Centres (yes, all of them!)
For our self-awareness and depth of presence to be of any real substance, it requires balance in and between our three basic centres of intelligence: the gut, the heart and the head. In this article, I wanted to present, in brief, what this means (and how it looks when the balance is off). The Gut Centre — wants, drive, resistance, and instinctual impulses Sometimes I hear…
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Anger in the instinctive triad — grasping the subtleties of the “triad theme” descriptions
Recently, I saw the question raised how Ones and Nines were “anger types” — Ones, after all, preferring to not show anger, and Nines seeming do bend over backwards to avoid it, both in themselves and from others. The only “anger type” that seems to live up to the name is the Eight. So, what gives? There are multiple ways to respond to this question. One…
Heart and gut “distinguished” (at least for relatively creative, flowing and open minds 😉)
Some people report confusion when it comes to the expression of the gut centre and heart centre, respectively. And sure — not only for “head types” but for all of us, it’s easy to see “head” on the one side and “not head” on the other. In part, this is because our general western culture likes dividing things into dual relationships: black and white, right and…
The ego: Recruiter, isolater and general mess-creator
I keep coming back to the centres. The importance of allowing them all their space to be, to fulfil the functions they were designed to fulfil. We all have one “home base” centre — the one whose triad we’re in. But we possess all three centres. We are WHOLE individuals, not thirds. But even as we are whole, we tend to gravitate to certain aspects and…
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